For about a decade, Pocket was where a certain kind of reader kept their intentions. The long investigative piece you found at 11pm. The conference talk someone linked in a group chat. The recipe, the essay, the tab you could not justify keeping open but could not bring yourself to close either.
Then it ended. And because it ended in stages — first the saving, then the reading, then the data itself — a lot of people are only now discovering that the archive they trusted for years is gone.
What actually happened
Mozilla announced Pocket’s closure in May 2025. The shutdown ran on a schedule that is worth stating plainly, because the details matter if you are trying to work out what you still have:
- May 2025AnnouncedMozilla confirms Pocket will close.
- 8 Jul 2025Saves stoppedApps and browser extensions stopped working. Export only.
- 12 Nov 2025Export closedDownloads switched off. Deletion began.
- SinceData goneQueued for permanent deletion by Mozilla.
Mozilla’s reasoning was straightforward and, to be fair to them, honestly argued: the way people save and consume content had changed, and maintaining Pocket was pulling resources away from the browser itself. That is a reasonable call for Mozilla. It was still a bad afternoon for several million people.
A bookmark is a promise you make to a future version of yourself. Pocket held ten years of those promises, and then it did not.
If you have your export
If you downloaded your data before 12 November 2025, you have the one thing Mozilla can no longer give anyone: a complete list of what you saved, as an HTML file (older exports) or a CSV (newer ones). Keep a copy somewhere safe before you do anything else with it.
You can import that file into My Minute Mix. Sign up, open the import page and choose the file. It is read in your browser, and only the links, their titles and the dates you saved them are sent to us — nothing else from the file. Items you had archived in Pocket are skipped unless you ask for them, links already in your library are skipped, and up to 2,000 links per import are saved and measured in the background, exactly like links you save by hand. Instapaper, Raindrop and browser-bookmarks exports work the same way.
The migration guide walks through it step by step. Before you import everything, read the last answer at the end of this piece.
If you never exported your data
First, the honest part: there is no way to retrieve your Pocket account now. Mozilla’s export window closed on 12 November 2025, and the data was queued for permanent deletion. Anyone offering to recover it for you is selling something.
But your reading list existed in more places than Pocket, and most people can reconstruct a usable version of it from what is left:
- Browser history. Every article you saved, you first visited. Search your history for the period you care about and export it. Chrome and Firefox both keep far more than people expect.
- Your browser bookmarks. Many Pocket users also bookmarked pages in Chrome, Safari, or Firefox out of habit — your synced browser bookmarks may still hold a surprising share of what you saved.
- Your inbox. Pocket sent weekly digest and recommendation emails for years. Searching your mail for messages from Pocket surfaces a real slice of what you had saved and read.
- Old exports. If you ever ran an export — even a stale one from 2022 — that HTML or CSV file is still a complete list of everything up to that date, and it imports like a recent one.
What to look for in a replacement
Most comparison articles will hand you a feature grid. Feature grids are not very useful here, because every serious read-it-later app has essentially the same features: a browser extension, a clean reader view, tags, search, offline access, and a mobile app. Those are table stakes and have been for years.
Four things actually differentiate them:
Where people are moving
Briefly and fairly, because the right answer depends on what you want:
Any of these will hold your links safely. That is the part the category has solved.
The problem none of them are solving
Here is what struck us while watching people migrate: almost everyone described the move as a chore, and almost nobody described their old list as something they were sad to lose. That is a strange thing to say about a decade of curation.
The reason is that a saved list is not really a library. It is a backlog. And a backlog grows by default, because saving takes two seconds and reading takes forty minutes. Every app in this category is optimized for the two-second action. None of them are optimized for the forty.
It is also not only an article problem. The same arithmetic produces a Watch Later list four hundred videos long, which is the same backlog wearing a different logo.
So the list gets longer, and the longer it gets the less inviting it becomes, until opening it feels like opening a drawer of unpaid bills. The failure is not storage. It is that nothing in these tools ever asks the only question that matters at the moment you might actually read something:
How much time do you have right now?
That is the question we built My Minute Mix around. Everything you save — articles, YouTube videos, podcast episodes, threads — goes into one place. Then you tell it you have five minutes, or fifteen, or an hour, and it assembles a mix that fits, in a sensible order, and keeps your place across all of it.
It is a smaller idea than a full knowledge system, and deliberately so. The point is not to help you save more. You are already excellent at saving. The point is to make the backlog finishable.
Frequently asked
Can I still get my Pocket data back?
No. The export window closed on 12 November 2025, and Mozilla queued everything for permanent deletion that day. Reconstructing from browser history and old Pocket emails is the practical route.
Can I import my Pocket export into My Minute Mix?
Yes, if you downloaded it before the export closed. Both the HTML and the CSV versions work, up to 2,000 links per import, with archived items skipped by default.
What is the closest app to Pocket?
Instapaper. Same shape, same philosophy, same restraint, and it has been running for longer than Pocket did.
Will this happen again?
To some app in this category, almost certainly. Which is why the export button is the first feature you should test, not the last. Anything you cannot get out of a tool is not really yours.
Do I have to migrate everything?
No, and you probably should not. If you import, the things you had already archived are skipped by default, which removes a lot of it. Beyond that, be ruthless: most of the rest was never going to be read, and carrying all of it into a new tool just recreates the drawer of unpaid bills somewhere else. Anything you import can be deleted later.